When I started reading Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel about a group of women forming a makeshift family in a house outside Tehran, the most topical thing about it was its longlisting for this year’s International Booker prize. Before I finished it, the US and Israel had unleashed a ferocious assault on Iran and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his generals, along with hundreds of civilians, had been killed. By the time this review has been published, the situation will no doubt have developed in further unpredictable ways.
Written throughout the 1970s but not published until 1989, Women Without Men was quickly banned by Iran’s Islamic authorities for unseemliness (a discussion of the nature of the hymen being of particular concern). It became a clandestine hit.
By the time of its publication, Parsipur, who was born in Tehran in 1946, had been jailed on several occasions, first by the Shah’s secret police and then the Islamic Republic. Her longest jail term lasted more than four years. In 1994 she left Iran for the US. An English edition of Women Without Men was first published in the US in 1998, and reissued in a new translation, by Faridoun Farrokh, in 2012. That version is the one used here, the book’s first ever British edition.
Eerily, Parsipur’s novel uses a backdrop of uprising and regime change. Although the novel sometimes seems to be (deliberately) unmoored from time, parts of it are dated to August 1953. This was when MI6 and the CIA masterminded a coup to depose the Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. His attempt to nationalise the country’s oil industry effectively spelled his end, and his overthrow strengthened the position of the Shah, who would in turn be removed in the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
The women in this novel are without men because they have outlived them, pushed them down the stairs, or, in the case of a sex worker, simply quit her job
The women in this novel are without men because they have outlived them, pushed them down the stairs, or, in the case of a sex worker, simply quit her job
Women Without Men doesn’t go into the 1953 coup in detail but it crackles at the edge of the narrative. When Fa’iza is leaving her house, her grandmother tells her to wear a chador over her western clothes. “Demonstrations everywhere,” she says. Getting into a taxi, the driver asks Fa’iza if she’s scared. At these moments the book reads like social realism, but it also includes one woman who turns into a tree, another who sees men as headless, and a third who first kills herself, is then murdered, but nevertheless lives on. If magic realism is one of your red flags, you might be persuaded by the deftness and humour with which Parsipur handles these fantastical elements.
The women in this novel are without men because they have outlived them, or been spurned by them, pushed them down the stairs, or, in the case of a sex worker, simply quit her job. They find their way to the house of Farrokhlaqa, a rich widow with political ambitions, but the honeymoon period doesn’t last. The commune falls apart, as with most things in this novel, with almost impatient speed.
The book’s brevity makes it compulsive to read, its hurry hurrying us along in turn. There’s little prevarication or soul-searching, and certainly no sentimentality; when Farrokhlaqa decides against returning to the house it’s because “she did not think she could stand the women” whom she had earlier come to rely on.
The title is a knowing inversion of Hemingway’s Men Without Women, a story collection that, according to Parsipur, showed “that men had no sense without women. They couldn’t reach the feminine spirit.” The differences – in desire, status, potential – between women and men are central to her book but she resists the term feminist, and Women Without Men is far from straightforward to interpret in terms of gender politics.
Consider Fa’iza, the most complicated character in the book, who sees her friend’s violent death as a route to marrying the murderer. Whenever she goes through an experience that might be leveraged for epiphany, catharsis or a clear moral lesson, Parsipur always goes for something more unexpected. It’s this that makes Women Without Men, for all its outlandish moments, profoundly human.
Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur is published by Penguin International Writers (£12.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £11.04. Delivery charges may apply
Photography supplied by Shahrnush Parsipur
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